International Leader in Minority Health Dr. Lovell Jones awarded the E.E. Just Lecturer Award

Lovell Jones, PhD, has been named the 2020 E.E. Just Lecture award recipient, presented by the Minorities Affairs Committee of the American Society for Cell Biology to memorialize early 20th-century biologist E.E. Just and to recognize outstanding scientific achievement by an underrepresented minority scientist.

Dr. Jones serves on the Texas A&M School of Public Health External Advisory Board and as an adjunct professor in the Department of Health Promotion and Community Health Sciences.

He has more than 40 year’s experience in addressing minority health and the health of the underserved. He became the first African American to be awarded Emeritus Professor status at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center as well as the University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Houston, becoming the first African American dual Emeritus Professor in the University of Texas System.

Dr. Jones is the founder of the Health Disparities, Education, Awareness, Research and Training Consortium (HDEART Consortium), which is a national and international organization of over 47 academic institutions and health organizations whose mission is to bring the strengthens of all of the entities to bear on addressing health inequities as a unit, rather than silos.

As a scientist, he has conducted extensive research into the relationship between hormones, diet and endocrine responsive tumors and presented his work both nationally and internationally. He is the editor of one of the few comprehensive textbooks on this subject, Minorities and Cancer. Dr. Jones has either chaired or co-chaired numerous major events regarding the underserved and cancers, including the American Cancer Society South Central U.S. Regional Hearings on Cancer and the Poor and the first National African Cancer Education meeting in Abuja, Nigeria. He is co-author of the congressional resolution designating the third full week in April as “National Minority Cancer Awareness Week.”

Dr. Jones was the first director of the congressionally mandated Center for Research on Minority Health (CRMH), a multidisciplinary center that fostered research which addressed the causes of health disparities and translated scientific results back to the communities affected by those disparities. The center also encouraged minority students to pursue careers in the biomedical sciences and worked to increase recruitment and retention of minority and medically underserved populations into clinical trials. CRMH evolved into joint University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center/University of Houston Dorothy I. Height Center for Health Equity and Evaluation Research (DH-CHEER). Dr. Jones directed DH-CHEER until he retired from this position.

He is a previous recipient of the Director’s Award for Excellence in Health Disparities by the National Institutes of Health Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities, the Ruth Kirschstein Diversity in Science Award, and was named one of the top African American Scientists in America by the National Science Foundation HistoryMakers. As a member of this group of HistoryMakers, his video biography is archived in the Library of Congress.